Showing up in search engines for relevant queries is crucial for online business. If you’re not visible, you’re not selling. It’s just that simple. There are many avenues to advertise your business on the internet: social media, video sharing (YouTube), guest blogging, self-promotion on forums and blogs, etc. However, unless you are convinced that you’re the next overnight internet celebrity success stories, you’re going to have to compete with everyone else in the arena of Google search.

Why? Because a whopping 1 Billion people worldwide use Google. With that many people performing searches on the web, whether you’re looking to market yourself locally, nationally or internationally, there is going to be a relevant demographic out there looking for businesses just like yours. If you aren’t diligently trying to ensure that you’re easily found on the very first page of results, then – as you’re about to learn – you are virtually invisible.

When we last wrote about click through rates (CTR), we brought up findings from an Optify study that showed just how powerful organic search engine rankings really are. Websites that are ranked on the first page of Google results for relevant keywords account for precisely 58.4 percent of all user clicks.

Are you in the top 10? Well, then you have very little chance of being found, which translates to very few visits to your website. It’s a harsh but true reality we face on the mean streets of Google SERPs.

Here’s a chart, courtesy of Optify that illustrates what we’re saying. If we take a look at the Click Throughs recorded for websites in the very 1st position of Google, the number is quite large: 8,220,278. Below it, the number shrinks to a still respectable 2,316,738. However, by the time you get down to position 10, you’re looking at less than half a million clicks. Things get even more dire by the time you reach poor position 11 on page 2. Welcome to no man’s land.

The curve you see here (again, provided by Optify) also goes to show just how important those top ten rankings are (though you really should be gunning for the first five). Look how sharply clicks decrease just after the first position. By the time you reach position 10, the line goes limp, and you really don’t have much of a curve to speak of. Trust us, it’s no fun being lost in the land of less than 5% clicks.

Turning it Around, Getting Found

Now, we won’t tell you it’s easy to claw your way to the top of Google, but there are proven methods for getting up there, and the result is a guaranteed growth in traffic and sales. The beauty of organic success is that once you make it to the top, some maintenance is all that’s needed to keep you there. Of course, things have changed a bit between Google unleashing their Panda and Penguin updates, but any SEO service worth a grain of salt has already adapted. Want to reach the highest peak but don’t know where to start? Contact us or give us a call at (888) 747-2239 to learn more about our methods for boosting businesses to the first page of Google.

When running a business online, in addition to providing your customers with the best possible products or services in your field, website protection should be at the forefront of your priorities. Protecting your website against malicious programs and attacks by hackers not only benefits your business in the short-term, you’ll also flourish in the long-term by looking out for your customers and ensuring their private information will never fall into the wrong hands.

Scan Your Website Now For Free

• http://www.avg.com.au/resources/web-page-scanner/
• https://www.virustotal.com/#url
• http://scanurl.net/

In addition to the tools listed above, you should check out the website protection checklist we’ve prepared below. Follow these tips, and you can feel safe in knowing that your website and customers are well-protected from malicious elements.

1. Dedicated Server

Before you go about building an online e-commerce empire, you need to ensure that your website runs on a server that is powerful enough to meet you and your clients’ needs. You can save some money by choosing a shared server, but you’ll also have to be willing to deal with the consequences. Shared hosting often entails limited bandwidth, skimpy storage space, and in many cases, dubious data security.

Dedicated servers, on the other hand, give you a lot more freedom in terms of size and bandwith. You and your clients will also benefit from increased data security. Not only will transactions be more secure on your site, your organization’s private information will also be protected, so the prying eyes of the web can’t take advantage of you either. Again, you can expect to pay more for a dedicate server than shared hosting, but when it comes to website protection, it pays not to be penny wise and pound foolish.

2. Anti-Malicious Software Protection

It’s sad but true: unscrupulous souls are out there trying to steal the personal information of you and your clients. Whether it’s potential attacks by malicious software (malware) or hacking, your online store can be sabotaged and compromised in the blink of an eye if you’re not careful. That’s why you need to ensure that your website is protected from malware. Bear in mind that most computer viruses are written for Microsoft platforms, making it especially necessary to defend yourself against any potential viruses if you’re using a Windows server. Also, keep in mind that even if you’re running a Linux server, you can still be vulnerable to viruses designed to target Windows.

Again, you’re certain to lose out on sales if you don’t keep your website virus-free. Potential clients may not even reach your website, because their browser will warn them to turn back if your site is infested.

So how do you determine if your website has been hit with a nasty virus? It’s actually pretty easy — and free! Simply take a look at the list of free anti-virus website scanners we’ve provided above.

Once you’ve located the source(s) of your virus problems, you can clean or remove the infected files and re-upload them to your server. Because scanning your website for viruses is free, thanks to the tools above, you should regularly do so to keep your website safe and functioning.

3. Restricting Access to Important Files/Folders

If you have a file or directory that contains personal information, ensure that it is not accessible by the general public. To do this, you can restrict access using certain programs, such as Folder Lock, which utilizes password protection, data encryption and more to keep prying eyes out of your private information.

4. SSL Certification

If your website features a checkout/virtual shopping cart feature, you owe it to your clients to offer a secure payment gateway that protects their private information. SSL Certification is a standard method for ensuring that your e-commerce site is secure. There are many ways to acquire an SSL Certificate for your website. A hosting service, such as GoDaddy, may be willing to provide one for a price, or you can obtain one from a web security company, such as Symantec.com.

SSL certificates ensures that a safe, secure transaction occurs whenever your customers attempt to buy your products or services. This process is carried out through a combination of data encryption and a secured communication between your clients’ web browsers and your SSL secure server.

Acquiring these certificates isn’t free (nor are they expensive). However, if you decide to cut corners and do not elect to secure your website’s payment gateway, you will pay a different price in the form of lost sales. Your customers will be able to see, through their web browser, that your website is not secure, and it is unlikely that they will go forward with a transaction. We can hardly blame them.

Remember, website protection helps you build a bond of trust between you and your customers. Making prospects and clients feel safe when making transactions on your website is one of the most important things an online business can accomplish.

Google is set to release a major change to the way their search engine yields results in the form of semantic search and Google Knowledge Graph. How will it affect you?

We all know how Google operates: You enter a search query into the field below the Google logo, press “Enter” or “Return” on your keyboard, and you’re whisked off to a land of authoritative websites with information that is (in theory) relevant to what you’re looking for.

And if you’re aware of the science behind Google search, you know that keywords and backlinks largely govern the results served up by search engines when users enter in queries.

However, in a few months, you may no longer expect to see a combination of ads and organic listings in the top positions. Thanks to a comprehensive information database Google has been working on (the “Knowledge Graph”), and an intelligent new spin on traditional search (“semantic search”), your search results may now provide you with direct answers to your questions.

A Precise A: for your Q:

Knowledge Graph may or may not differ drastically from the handy information Google currently provides when you enter queries like “pi” or currency-related terms, such as “lira.”

To get a taste of what search results may look like when Google rolls out its Knowledge Graph, enter “pi” into Google. Note that you still receive the same 10 organic results you’d expect, along with the info, “pi = 3.14159265″ at the top.

It remains to be seen if this will change after the big update, but it’s hard to imagine this feature will too harshly affect small businesses relying on organic rankings. After all, a handy statistic or factoid is all well and good, but it won’t get your house re-painted, your glasses repaired or your kitchen remodeled. When searching for businesses, consumers still want listings for relevant, reputable services in their area, and Google probably won’t tamper with that too much.

The Smarty Pants Search Engine

On the other hand, semantic search could be quite the game-changer. Semantic search results, in theory, will no longer provide a list of websites ranked by keyword relevancy and the amount of backlinks garnered from authoritative sources. Google, utilizing a new “artificial intelligence,” will now factor in the intent behind users’ search queries and may, in turn, respond with websites that best answer their questions. For example, if you’re searching for rates or prices pertaining to a product or service, you’ll now (in theory) be provided with pages that actually list price ranges, as opposed to pages that are simply optimized for keywords containing the word “prices.”

Again, this shouldn’t affect the local repairman or painting service, who rely on terms such as “house painters (insert your city or town here).” If anything, it could offer new opportunities to get ranked by including useful information and data in your content. If you’re an expert in your field, this should be easy to include, and you could earn a nice boost in Google brownie points in the process.

Right now, there’s no telling if these changes will impact websites’ rankings as much as the Google Panda update did last year. Until these changes occur, it would be best to wait with cautious optimism. When that time arrives, if your rankings happen to drop and don’t seem to return after a few weeks, then it might be a good idea to include more relevant facts, stats and prices on your website, which would probably benefit your visitors anyway and, perhaps, your business in the long run.

*Image, “New, Improved *Semantic* Web! Now with added meaning…” provided by Flickr user, “dullhunk” under the Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.

Today we’re going to give you some tips on executing the ultimate SEO press release. In our last post, we discussed what NOT to do when writing and distributing a press release. In summary, when setting out to create an SEO press release, you don’t want to write dry, boring articles with little news to speak of — save that sort of thing for an article directory.

So you’ve taken our advice to heart, and you want to avoid the mistakes that snag most SEOs when writing press releases but don’t know where to start… Today’s blog post is all about setting you on the right path to SEO press release success.

Writing an Attention-Worthy SEO Press Release

As we said in our last update, you want to create an SEO press release when you truly have something newsworthy to share. If you don’t have anything interesting to share with the world, you can’t expect the public to take interest. Limit your releases to occasions that are truly worth reporting.

You’ll want to add a lot of TLC as you create your news release. In addition to writing content and including keywords relevant to your field, you’ll also want to optimize it for human eyes and search engines.

Optimizing a press release isn’t unlike optimizing a website. Give it a bland design and get stingy on the content, and your release is going to wallow like a small guppy lost in a sea of sharks. Therefore, if you treat your press release like a blog or web page, and dress it up accordingly, you’re much more likely to get noticed by the public and indexed by search engines. Take the time to perfect the formatting and also think about images and video that you’d like to include.

Are you excited to read this press release? Neither are we.

What Type of Newswire Should You Choose?

An important step in the process of generating SEO press releases is deciding where you’re going to submit it to. There are many press release distribution sites out there, but the ones that are going to help you the most are those that allow you to add bells and whistles to your release.

In addition to plain text, your newswire of choice should allow you to incorporate internal links to keyword-relevant pages of your website, as well as images and videos. All of the above features offer golden opportunities for SEO.

Below we’ve included a list of ideal newswires/press release distributors that are ideal for SEO press releases. In other words, these support anchor text links and other multimedia features.

1. IdeaMarketers.com
2. Bignews.biz
3. FreePressRelease.com
4. OnlinePRNews.com
5. PR-Inside.com
6. dBusinessNews.com
7. Seenation.com
8. Google Base
9. PR-USA.net
10. OpenPR.com

In closing, you want to give your press release the works. Cut no corners when creating SEO press releases, and your efforts will pay off. Waving bland content with no substance in the face of the internet isn’t going to help you make any kind of a splash. Instead, provide a fascinating multimedia attraction, and you’ll make the impact you desire.

How often should your business submit a press release? Are press releases worth the effort it takes to write, optimize, and distribute across the web in the first place?

Over the years, the press release has remained an oft-used tool in the utility belt of most SEOs. If you’re into search engine optimization, you probably love press releases, which provide another opportunity to build backlinks. However, one of the greatest SEO myths out there is that you should release them as often as possible to raise your rankings.

When to Write Press Releases

It’s simple: Submit a news release when you actually have something news-worthy to report. This rule especially applies to SEO specialists who love to release “news” articles at a constant frequency.

Want to kill some time and laugh a little in the process? Do a little research on Google, and you’ll find plenty of lists filled with unimaginably bad news releases. As we mentioned earlier, these press releases aren’t truly designed for human standards; instead, they’re written and released to be indexed by search engines.

News releases certainly have their purpose, but the typical SEO news release is not much of a news item to begin with. Choose any random press release on PRLOG, and you’re likely to encounter a thinly-veiled SEO article better suited for an article directory.

If you’re releasing a news release every week or month, then the content you’re providing is likely to be of little interest to anyone — including the search engines. By clogging up the same distribution sites with the same anchor texts again and again, you’re only defusing any link-building opportunities that existed through these channels. Remember, your link-building needs to be varied in order to be effective. Building the same backlinks again and again on the same domains smells like spam to both search engines and readers. Your rankings won’t improve, nor will you generate leads with worthless news releases.

So remember to resist the urge and just say no to bad press releases. If you’re releasing the same sort of drivel again and again for the sake of SEO, your ROI will leave something to be desired.

A canonical link is a nifty, fairly new way to communicate with search engine crawlers and direct them to the preferred pages of your website. In the past, if you happened to have dynamically-generated directories or pages that would cause duplicate content issues, you’d probably be advised to exclude it via robots.txt.

Nowadays, since Google announced its preferred URL specification feature, the canonical tag, doing such a thing seems drastic. After all, you want to accommodate search engines as they crawl through your site as much as possible. We don’t want to be rude hosts, lest we get the spiders upset, and they exact cold revenge in the form of bad SERP results. Plus, you don’t really want to see hundreds or thousands of crawling issues appear in your Webmaster Tools account do you? So it’s best to listen to Google, who now recommends controlling your impulse to add exclusions to robots files; instead, turn to canonical links to battle internal duplicate content.

A Sadly Common SEO Horror Story

So you’ve done your research on SEO, and you’ve tattooed the slogan, “Content is king!” to your brain. You’ve written unique, top quality articles for every page on your website, each containing keywords that are relevant to your field. Once it all goes live, you anxiously check Google every day, waiting for your new website to appear on the first page. However, after a month or more of waiting, you find that it’s just not happening. In fact, you’re nowhere to be found on Google at all.

What could be the problem? You ask an SEO expert to have a look at your website, or maybe you run a page or two through Copyscape, and the bad news smacks you like a sack of bricks: you’ve got a nasty internal duplicate content issue. You see, you may have written all of your content yourself, vowing to never steal from another source , but all the while, under the hood, your website was a veritable duplicate content farm, churning out dynamically-generated variations of the same page over and over again, each containing the exact same article word-for-word.

This sort of thing can easily happen when you’re utilizing a blog or e-commerce platform for your website. In many cases, product pages or blog articles can be accessed through multiple paths and URLs, leading to over-indexation problems and penalties.

While your website may be a well-oiled machine where function and usability are concerned, it may be stirring up all sorts of problems with search engines behind the scenes. Fortunately, Google wants to be your friend, and for this reason, they’ve introduced the canonical tag.

Example of a Canonical Tag

Doing a little research on how to add canonical links to your website can save you a great deal of frustration – and grow your business or blog in the process. A canonical link appears under the hood of your website and looks something like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.youramazingwebsite.com/blog/dont-duplicate-this-content” />

What we have here is a canonical link added to a blog post entitled, “Don’t Duplicate This Content.” This code is communicating your preferred URL for the article. This way, in the event that a variant page with the same article is generated through sorting methods utilized by the blog (e.g. tags) or other factors, Google will recognize that the content stems back from a single, primary source (www.youramazingwebsite.com/blog/dont-duplicate-this-content), and all of the URLs with the same article that may have spawned dynamically after the fact shouldn’t lose you any brownie points.

If you’re seeing such issues arise within your website, you’re welcomed to utilize a mixture of robots.txt and canonical links, though it’s probably best if you first experiment with the addition of a canonical link. After some time, if you’re finding that your rankings still leave something to be desired, then you can either submit a request to Google, through Webmaster Tools, asking them to reconsider your website, or you can bust out the robots.txt and scorch any issues you’ve had by disallowing pages and directories – just don’t be surprised when the spiders complain, and your Webmaster Tools fills up with crawl errors.

You may remember our previous post on bookmarklets. In that article, we discussed the basics of how a bookmarklet works and gave our readers a few samples to try out. If the word, “bookmarklet” doesn’t ring a bell, then we’ll quickly recap for you.

A bookmarklet is a handy dandy line of code designed to streamline the sorts of tasks an SEO specialist or common web-user might perform on a daily basis. These shortcuts can be incorporated into your web browser’s bookmarks or favorites menu, so you can quickly access them whenever you please. Whether you’re looking to check out how many pages of a website have been indexed in Google on the fly, or you would like to remove the skewed personalized rankings Google annoyingly adds to your search results without hassle, bookmarklets can take care of tasks like these for you in an instant.

Because we’re so fond of bookmarklets, we thought we’d follow up our previous post with a sizable list of our favorites. Also, because it is the holiday season, we’re also including an extra treat at the end – just make sure you don’t check it out while you’re at work! If you’re not sure how to actually use bookmarklets, be sure and review our previous update on the subject for instructions.

• • Analyze the page you’re on with SEM Rush.
• • Instant Google insights.
• • Generate a MajesticSEI report on a web page’s backlink history.
• • Find out if search engine crawlers are able to reach the page your’e on (by Tom Critchlow).
• • Quick Whois domain lookup report.
• • Compete.com Traffic Report.
• • Have Google list all indexed pages within a website (by Jesse Ruderman).
• • Clear cookies for the page you’re viewing.
• • Say hello to instant Alexa info.
• • Travel back in time with the WayBack Machine.
• • Transform the page you’re on into a bite-sized URL, perfect for Twitter posts.
• • Word and character counter. A huge personal favorite.
• • Send your current page through Gmail.
• • Check a page’s keyword density. By Webconf.

Now for your present: a retro arcade game-style bookmarklet that allows you to pilot a ship and destroy innocent, unsuspecting web pages everywhere. If you’ve ever played Asteroids for the Atari, you’ll feel right at home hovering around, wrecking havok on the web. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you, “Kick Ass,” courtesy of Erik Rothoff Andersson.

Kick Ass

Now we can only hope that an intrepid Java developer will come along and create bookmarklets inspired by other Atari classics like Adventure or Yar’s Revenge.

Have you heard about the “data service providers for Google scam“? Recently, some marketing companies have been reaching out to what they hope will be unsuspecting businesses, claiming to be a data service provider for Google. If you’re “lucky” enough to receive such a call, they will inform you that they have newly-opened positions in the major search engines to offer that they’re kindly saving just for your business. Do yourselves a favor and don’t believe a word of it, folks. This is nothing more than a scam, and it likely won’t be long before the perpetrators have the screws put to them by the real representatives of Google.

Don’t Trust So-Called Google Data Service Providers That Call  You

One known company to employ this tactic is Local Lighthouse Internet Marketing. We mention this firm specifically, because they actually called us to shill this dishonest pitch. A little bit of research brings up this blog post in which a few of the people leaving comments share their own experiences and wary sentiments regarding the company.

Google search some more, and you’ll find plenty of additional commentary on the web that describes these so-called “data service providers for Google” as being “deceitful” and “deliberately misleading.” Blogger, Ron Wiebe, calls this, “the shadiest method of SEO . . . marketing I’ve encountered to date . . .”

If you have indeed received this sort of phone call, simply Google the name and phone number, and you’ll likely see them listed as offenders in various scam watch lists.

Remember, web authority and search engine rankings are earned, not given. No Google data service provider will come knocking on your door with a magic wand that will make your business no. 1 on the internet. Do business with honest professionals that use tried and true search engine optimization to make it happen.

What is a bookmarklet? It’s a small scrap of javascript code that can make you look like an SEO stud in front of your colleagues by providing very handy shortcuts that can help you accomplish everyday SEO tasks in a flash.

So You Want to Start a Bookmarklet Collection…

How do you get in on the ultra convenient and exciting world of bookmarklets? It depends on what browser you use to explore the web. With Google Chrome, you just drag a link into your Bookmarks Bar and click the resulting bookmark.

Firefox users can right-click on a link and choose “Bookmark This Link,” which can then be accessed through the bookmarks menu. The process for Internet Explorer users is similar: You right-click a link and choose “Add to Favorites.” It is worth noting that users have complained that recent I.E. updates have made it a bit more difficult to utilize bookmarklets. You may need to add websites to the “Trusted Zone” before they work.

Using Bookmarklets

Want to find out how many pages of a website are indexed in Google at record-breaking speed using Google Chrome?

1. Click and drag this link into your Chrome bookmarks bar: GG Indexed Pages
2. Visit the website you intend to look up.
3. Click on your new bookmark(let).
4. Enjoy the results.

There’s no shortage of useful bookmarklets out there. How about some instant SEMrush data? Tweet searches for references to your website? Check Tweets. If you can think of a regular internet-browsing process to streamline, there’s likely bookmarklets out there that do the trick.

Feel free to check out our previous post on seo tools for more handy advice.

Does your website need a robots.txt? Do you already have one in place with exclusions? For the uninitiated, robots.txt is a handy little file that allows you to communicate with your friendly search engine visitors (sometimes called “spiders” or “crawlers”) and guide them through your website. After all, you want to be a good host, so it’s important to direct crawlers to the pages of your site that you specifically intend for them to see, rather than leave them wandering around, wondering where they’re intended to go.

As we’ve previously stated in our post on SEO myths, you don’t need to have a robots.txt file if you prefer your website to be an entirely open book. If you wish to have every page crawled and indexed on Google, then don’t worry about implementing this file – you simply don’t need it!

However, you may have pages within certain directories that contain no SEO value at all. Moreover, their lack of unique content could even hurt your rankings, so it certainly couldn’t hurt to look into whether or not a robots.txt file is right for you.

Understanding Robots.txt

Think of your website as your home and the search engine crawlers that visit your website as your house guests. Whenever you have company visiting your house, you’re likely to have them stay in rooms designed for leisure, such as your living room or den. On the other hand, you probably wouldn’t show them your messy garage or filthy attic.

These rooms certainly serve a purpose, but they’re just not designed to welcome or accommodate your guests. In a similar fashion, you may have a blog or e-commerce website, loaded with products or posts that can be sorted by tags, dates and other search filters designed to help visitors (of the human variety) find exactly what they’re looking for. However, the multiple URLs that are created by these added directories serve no SEO value and will only result in search engines indexing the same content multiple times.

First, you should check to see if a robots.txt file has already been implemented within a website. To do so, type in the following in your browser address bar:

www.YourWebsite.com/robots.txt

If you receive a 404 error, then there’s no robots.txt file in place. Alternatively, you can use the robots.txt checker we’ve recommended in our previous SEO tools entry.

Creating Exclusions

If your search comes up negative, then it’s time to setup your own robots.txt file. Let’s say you have an e-commerce website, and the many filters and sorting options featured within your shopping cart platform creates multiple URLs for the same product page, each indexed within Google.

First, decide which directories are causing these problems. Before creating exclusions, ensure that these have zero SEO value and are only hurting your website’s rankings by remaining open to search engine crawlers (most likely through the creation of duplicate content).

Once you’ve identified the offending directories, open Notepad or any text editor and create a file called “robots.txt.” Using /tags/ as an example directory, you can tell search engines to keep their crawlers from going where they’re not welcomed:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /tags/

The asterisk denotes all search engines, but you can specify specific ones (e.g. “User-agent: Googlebot”).

Save when you’re done and upload the robots.txt file to your website’s root directory. Now every page that falls within www.YourWebsite.com/tags/ will not be crawled, and if you’ve created this exclusion for all the right reasons, then you may very well see your search engine rankings improve and your duplicate content issue disappear.

*Photo “MSR-H01 Hexapod robot” appears courtesy of Flickr user, masochismtango under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.